Secret Weapon Revealed at Last

Good music doesn't always need to teem with willfully aesthetic and venerable ambition. For every Jim\n\ Morrison and ...

Good music doesn't always need to teem with willfully aesthetic and venerable ambition. For every Jim Morrison and prog-rock band, bound on one side by megalomania and on the other by ineptitude, there's a flagrantly idiotic band like The Stooges or The Sex Pistols, more concerned with having a guitarist who uses his instrument as a rowdy projectile than with having liner notes based on a Mabuse triptych and Das Kapital. Pussy Galore were a good band not because they were satirical, but because none of them knew how to play their instruments. And that is hilarious. Not many people can relate to the classical sublimity of guitarist Christopher Parkening, but everyone can relate to the thought that guitars sound crazy when you hit them on things.

That was my pre-Secret Weapon Revealed at Last philosophy. Now I'm starting to wonder: Is dumb, improvisational noise-rock an essential component of modern music, or is it merely the remarkably infantile and incomprehensible product of some kids who taught themselves make-believe chords between episodes of Punk Planet USA?

When this conflict hits the courts, let the noise-rockers pray that The Country Teasers have not been subpoenaed. The Scottish band had some quirky records back in the late 90s, the sort of music that easily offended patrons believe is cutely offensive, but difficultly offended ones find vapid and tiresome. While 1999's Destroy All Human Life had a penury of memorable songs, it did at least have a Tammy Wynette cover and some vaguely political satire to obscure the ineffectiveness of the band. The new album offers no such reprieve.

The first song, "Success", like most of the album, belongs to the Dr. Demento school of disaster; these are either terrible songs or terrible parodies of terrible songs. This iteration may make interesting conceptual art, but it isn't very good music. (The song is so bad it made a Pitchfork reviewer invoke Dr. Demento.) It's a bedraggled, clumsy piece that tries to conglomerate noise, garage, and pop, and essentially fails at all of them. Sample lyric (if I heard correctly): "Anna Kournikova was thirteen years old when she entered the world of sex/ I mean, success." After interrogating that line for some time, it's unclear whether it's supposed to be entertaining. If so, is it intended to be entertaining on its own, or making fun of people/bands that think that line is entertaining?

If you're anything like me, you probably didn't finish reading the preceding paragraph because you didn't care anymore. It's true that their former albums were comic rejoinders to the sort of people that don't recognize them as humorous, but this album, when it's tolerable, simply did not amuse me. If I couldn't possibly fathom the uproarious comedy because it's making fun of people like me, well then, I guess I despise it even more. Some songs, like "Harry Wine 2", are at least familiar as poor façades of better rock. The guitar riffs are rarely sustainable for more than five seconds, though some do make it to eight. I'm fairly certain "Todtill" involves only one chord. This may sound like a clamorously ideal melding of Scottish country with Japanese noise, but it's delivered more like one-third of the chorus of a Rancid song. After I heard it for the first time, I thought to myself, "Why isn't my stereo working?" Then I realized I was so bored that I'd started to mentally efface my faculty for listening.

The most complimentary sentiment I can muster is that this album has horrific production. Even then, however, many albums have worse. I realize this was a particularly ostentatious review, written by some haughty upstart who thinks he knows about music, but I honestly think I could make a better album than this, even though I currently suffer from poor eyesight, bronchitis, and a sizeable gash that precludes the use of my right hand.